How Walter Winchell created this mess we’re in
Walter Winchell circa 1930s Image by Granger
By PJ Grisar October 19, 2020
Much to the dismay of his many critics, Walter Winchell, wouldn’t — and still won’t — go away.
An innovator of the gossip column and early radio idol, his style was unmistakable. He was the grandson of a cantor and he introduced a novel, niggun-like rhythm to the airwaves, while in print, his non sequitur prose and colorful neologisms (informed by his time playing the Vaudeville circuit) spoke to the everyman.
“What Walter Winchell understood, almost uniquely among journalists, was gossip was a way to take down the mighty and raise up the lowborn,” said Winchell biographer Neal Gabler in the new PBS American Masters documentary, “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip,” debuting October 20. The documentary shows Winchell’s rise, fall and continued relevance, with the broadcaster’s words read by Stanley Tucci, who won an Emmy for playing the newsman in 1999.
At his peak, Winchell had a reach that was about as close to monomedia as America came in the 20th Century. With his radio show and his widely-syndicated column, he transitioned to hard news by reporting the Lindbergh Baby trial, securing scoops by dining with the prosecutor. A few years later, he was the most strident American voice condemning Nazism and, when Charles Lindbergh became the figurehead for the isolationist America First Committee, he went gunning for the aviator and erstwhile bereaved father after he delivered his antisemitic Des Moines speech for AFC members. You may know Winchell from a book — or its HBO miniseries adaptation — that covers some of these events, Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” where Winchell campaigns against Lindbergh as a defender of the Jews and is murdered for his efforts.
In truth, Winchell lived long enough to see himself become a villain, shifting his coverage from attacks on Hitler in the 1930s, to smears of fellow citizens suspected of “Un-American activities” in the 1950s as J. Edgar Hoover’s confidant. Throughout his career Winchell was informing on people and brushing shoulders with some of the most iconic figures of his era.
“He should be an important thing to all people, which is the one thing he didn’t end up being — important or remembered,” said Ben Loeterman, director of “The Power of Gossip.” Yet while that was true on a personal level — Winchell became obscure and outmoded in his final days — we can’t shake the atmosphere he left behind.
Loeterman believes that the now-porous boundaries between news and entertainment and political power and journalism all trace back to Winchell’s penchant for salaciousness. We now see his habit for celebrity scandal in the grocery store checkout tabloids, hear his quick-tempo cadence on talk radio and receive his broadsides and distortions on cable news and even from the White House.
I spoke with Loeterman, the director of films like “The People v. Leo Frank” and several documentaries on “Frontline,” about why it’s still Winchell’s world and we’re all living in it. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PJ Grisar: What specifically drew you to Winchell as a subject?
Ben Loeterman, directing Stanley Tucci for “Walter Winchell: The Power of Gossip.” “Tucci had made himself a student of Walter Winchell,” Loeterman said, citing the actor’s previous work in the HBO film “Winchell.” Image by Courtesy of Ben Loeterman
Ben Loeterman: I was really flailing around, frustrated and curious about how the media discourse around our current political situation got to be the way it is. I started skipping back in time. Columbia Journalism Review had done an article called “Before Jon Stewart.” I wondered, before Jon Stewart, OK, there was Rush Limbaugh. Eventually it led me to the origin story of Winchell, which I think does speak in ways different to how one can talk about Yellow Journalism in the 1890s. I think Winchell really speaks to our modern media circus and how it got to be that way.
Yeah, you see him creating a form of news entertainment — a gossip column, leveraging connections, flouting journalistic standards.
[On] what you rightly call his “connections.” The story as we learned it is that Winchell was sitting, minding his own business — and everybody else’s private business — on Broadway at the Stork Club when the phone rings and there’s somebody he can’t really believe is an FBI agent on the other end of the phone saying, “The new president would like to see you in the morning.” [Franklin] Roosevelt quickly seduces him by saying “Mr. Winchell, I’d like your audience.” That’s not all on Winchell, that speaks to someone like Roosevelt seizing the power of a populist and a popular audience in his time. It goes both ways, and one can’t only blame Trump.
Right. Trump has his Fox News cabinet members, but a very different president kind of did the same thing. Winchell goes from one kind of populist appeal — left-wing once he met Roosevelt — to a right-wing demagogue in line with McCarthy. Why do you think that happened?
What he learned as a child, in his own words, [was] he didn’t want to be cold and he didn’t want to be alone. The creation of his striving and his wanting to be liked [is what] drives him. It’s very hard otherwise to reconcile his politics from his early days and his admirable taking on of the Nazis to taking on the cause of Joseph McCarthy. Winchell was very wary of McCarthy at first. It was this reaching out by Roy Cohn who introduced him [to McCarthy]. Winchell did become part of that strain of Jews who did not want to be labelled in a knee jerk way as a communist or socialist. That woven together with the strand of populism that he cared most about, more than politics, is the way I can explain his going from one side to the other.
**Of course. Cohn by his own documentarian’s account, is an example of that strain of Jew, and he was a lifelong registered Democrat.
My first introduction to Winchell — apart from Billy Joel — was in “The Plot Against America” where he’s presented as a foil for Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh is a big part of his trajectory in real life obviously. What do you think of where Roth comes down on him in that book?
I could see how for an artist like Roth, Winchell took on these larger than life elements to him. He was a force of nature and he was a force of culture in this country that was outsized. Nobody who grew up with the likes of a Howard Stern, an Oprah Winfrey, a Jon Stewart, a Sean Hannity, [could imagine] that someone would literally have the ear on a Sunday night of two-thirds of the adult American population, and that they’d be reading him the other six days of the week. It’s kind of like taking all those names I’ve mentioned and rolling them into one and you might have Walter Winchell.
It seems to me like there’s some things to commend this guy for and a whole lot more damage done. I wonder what you think of him and his legacy now.
What I try to do in my films is empathize or channel, especially with historical and dead figures, what is going on in their mind. With Winchell it’s very very difficult. He talks like a machine gun and he thinks like a machine gun and he probably has the memory of a machine gun, which is to say, not at all. It’s always about the next bullet coming out. Though his stuff is incredibly beautifully-crafted, his wordsmithing, it’s hard to say the same about his thinking. It’s whatever rolled off the tongue, whatever he last saw or touched or talked to that really had the biggest influence on Walter Winchell day to day.
We talked about Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor, for whom Winchell himself served as a kind of mentor. Do you see a direct line between the president and Winchell’s influence. Is that overstating it? Both seem very fond of childish nicknames for the people they don’t like.
Jon Meacham caught my attention most, and I think said it best, when he said “What we’ve watched is the Winchellization of politics.” That’s what’s happened. That used to be the realm of some mix of entertainment and journalism, and I think now that has become our politics. No. I don’t think it’s a stretch at all.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture reporter. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
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